Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 16:58:10 -0700
From: Tim Stillman
Subject: "In the Manger of the Moon"
"In the Manger of the Moon"
by
Timothy Stillman
Jimmy, in his measured wisdom, watched down at me from
his home in the moon, and some day, I just knew, I would climb up
the long shadow ladder of his body that lay against the white orb of
night, and kiss his lips and be kissed by him.
For he was tall and slender and wise, with a mind of secretive
magician's bright stage show scarves, that had the shadows of fun fire
going night and day, it seemed, in his thoughts that were like the
wings of dark doves, swooping down and across and back to
unreachable again.
What I thought back then, when autumn happened to the
years, and not to me. Spring forever and wiggling into brown and
corduroy skies at play when the temperature was spider web perfect
and night for the skittering of candy tinted leaves dancing dark and
mysterious and crusty down the streets and the gutters, on their long
march home to winter.
It was close to ten when the theater let out its collective
breath, and released us few children from the Italian film of "The Tell
Tale Heart"--a celluloid heart concocted with far more sex in it than
Poe originally had in mind. For Poe was the writer with difficult to
understand crimped tightly dank words, but the film kissed him off,
and instead, told the story of a voyeur that thrust us into the enflamed
eyes of a peeper obsessed with the nightly disrobings and sexual
contagion of almost nudity and salacious language of sheer silk and
panting breath and an accompanying score of clumsy dark violin and
oboe music that made this unobtainable (by him at least) woman into
the sexual Pandora of this sultry obsession. As he longed to be all
those port glasses of red poured down the throat of this shadowy
seductress in the dim yellow back lighting, in her bedroom, across the
alley from the window of the tormented, enflamed voyeur who finally
exacted revenge.
All of it taking place in a world never to see the sun--she in
dress, as she slowly unbuttoned and peeled it, in her window, then
down to her underthings. Like a curving female Mythos, taking great
smiling pride in divesting herself of her forest leaves and too low and
covering sky smoke. And her roaming hands that seemed to find only
the firmament of pride lashed into her whale boned corset and
especially at her tightly bound breasts in filmy black lace covering
that she stroked over and again and offered tauntingly, cruelly to the
man across the way, and through his eyes, in which we hid, to us. She
and her men and her nightly oily rituals with herself and with them
powered the story, tented the boys, and embarrassed the girls who
went to see the movie also, but which made them equally as curious,
for reasons they didn't understand.
The rudiments of Poe's story having been lost on the kids in
the audience. But it was Edgar Allan Poe, done up, the adults thought,
as a kiddy horror film, one the adults would not be interested in. But
the buzz of more and more children who had seen it was like the
rapacious scuttling of a million whispery beetles on the playground
and in the school corridor tunnels, in excited shadow play of words,
"There's this movie you gotta see," and thus packed the theater for
much of the film's run. For the children had to see it and were
allowed, because it was based on a classic of literature. It would help
us get into college. So lingering in a sexual world that was giggly free
of literary conundrums, the so wise boys and girls thus indulged. And
on school nights yet. Boy was this rich.
The theater's management, knowing a good thing when they
see one, in this small town, kept it around for a week and a half, so
most of the kids saw it over and over again, forgetting this was
supposed to be a horror film, as well as forgetting what was buried
under the bed somewhere in the moulange of the striptease goulash
with the heavy breathing and the window box woman turning always
her back almost to the camera when she took off her corset,
sensuously slithering out of it and her breast covering as well--not
needing a corset of course, because of her slender hour glass
figure--and freeing her breasts from their laced straining hiding, by
stroking them to the slathering children who wished to run to the
other side of the movie screen and see the real stuff.
Jimmy was beside me as we walked out of the theater that
Thursday night.. He had to coax me a lot to see the film. For hearts
under beds (though I hadn't thought of that yet, but would soon,
thanks to my true blue friend, Jimmy) were the further turning of the
tight, close to breaking clock of the continuing movie horror show
that attracted and repelled me--late night in my bed, seeing--Mr.
Sardonicus glaring at me over his huge smile and Gorgo knocking his
massive dinosaur tail against my bedroom window and my chest
hurting.
And hearts under my bed being the final indignity my battered
mind could endure, from horror films and TV horror shows that I
indulged in in spite of myself from time to time. It was like pulling
out the crutches from under the arms of a lame boy who tosses good
sense aside and willingly, with much fright, falls down the long black
sere slope of cold ground tumbling endlessly underneath him on a
cold Halloween night when the only sound in the world is of
fingernails scratching on blackboards. And thus falling in
helplessness to his heart's content. All the turn over of the world and
the loosening of boundaries and never knowing what would happen
next.
So I had begged off seeing the movie for some time, knowing
I would give in because of Jimmy's cold calculated glaze forming
round me as though it were frozen honey manufactured from winter
bees up ahead stitching the air together, making the theater smell of
popcorn and Cokes in cardboard cups, and juju beads, and come on
Barry or I won't be your friend anymore, and that last always the
charmer, always the unspoken threat that made magus cloaks out of
midnight hedges, that sang other distances I would walk alone in such
blood in the throat fear. I felt his threats pressing me into a small dark
box, and in there to die. That signaled the closed door and me, out of
it, forever more.
Finally, in sick stomach fear, and feeling like I was on
precipitous toothpick stilts, very high up, I went to see the film the
last night of the film's run here. In fear of horror scenes, but more
fear of the potential nudity in the movie. "I'm not saying she doesn't
show 'em" Jimmy intoned with that honor student voice of
serendipity and the peeling gauze and slippery knife taunt, which, in
its own flip side way, said as usual that things would be just fine with
me if he were there beside me, because he was Captain Midnight in
whom the shiny sun lived even on the darkest night of winter. "But
then I'm not saying there aren't some tits there either. Come on, you
have to get your eye ball cherries busted eventually, dontcha?"
So we saw the movie and I sat close to him, without touching
his shoulders and I watched the grainy badly dubbed black and white
film, not understanding it, my gaze partly away from the screen,
especially during scenes, in massive close up, of the actress' mouth,
as often her tongue tip was exploring in various disconcerting,
troubling, perplexing ways, her dark shiny black upper lip, as though
searching for something lost. I could feel Jimmy's presence next to
me. I was ashamed for him for reasons I couldn't understand. As
though I had presented this as some sort of gift to him. Knowing
without doubt that he would double cross me and take it. I tried to
feel a tingle of sexuality concerning solely what was happening on
the big screen. But it kept mingling in my mind with him and me.
I tried to feel some kind of shock of fear, but it was all so
languorous, all so slovenly put together, that when the window
poseur, who was a prostitute, took badly complexioned and
somewhat corpulent men to her bed for heavy breathing and diving,
the both of them, beyond camera range, that was not remedied by the
audience all stretching up a little to see below the bottom of the
screen, it just baffled me. All of this to madden the peeper across the
way, (why couldn't he just buy her too? was not thought of readily by
children back then--fate was fate and that was all it was) as the
woman and her men kissed and kissed dully making their lips press
together and funnily flatten their faces for no particular reason, rather
like two empty cement sacks pressed resolutely together, I could feel
only the pasta smell and taste in their mouths, for they ate a great deal
of that in this film as well, and how cheesy and ugly it all seemed to
be. And how desperately much I wanted to touch Jimmy like the men
touched that woman. Fingerprints in darkness. But no shame, like
there was in this sleazy film. And the shame and fear in me that
Jimmy could read my thoughts and would pull away from me, not
having known before.
There was, at long last in this slow slow film, a living beating
amputated heart--and in a bow to the Teenage Werewolf and
Frankenstein cheap black and white films that had some color tinting
at the final shock scene--this film also had a bit of color when the
beating heart was dug out of the flooring from under the bed of the
last of the prostitute's clients. Of course, the heart being that of the
prostitute herself, because the voyeur had finally gotten quite enough
of her all knowing sex shows in the midnight hours across from his
flat, and she, laughing that black lipped laughter Italian actresses
were so good with back then, as her eyes slid about like black and
white ball bearings controlled and so knowing, thus unmanning him
for the rest of his life. And finally the movie resolved, sort of, and
ended thank god.
So Jimmy, my hero, his face in the moon, his long body the
ladder against the moon that was my heart, and I, walked among a
few other kids, all boys, as they knocking round with Jimmy some,
some socking each other, others laughing, leaving the theater through
the bright lobby lights and out the large glass doors, as I stood to the
side. There had only been eight or nine other kids in addition to us.
Others had seen the film three and more times, but were tired of it
and wanted to move on to something kinkier.
The lights outside the theater, in a world suddenly seeming
vast in comparison to the cramped theater, were bright also and
yellow. There was the smell and taste of popcorn in the air, as well as
on my hands and on my shirt because I learned long ago movies are a
voyage into the mind and you have to be prepared with food and
drink because movies, likely as not, show you something about
yourself or the world that you would rather not know, and there must
be a distraction or two somewhere. Munchies sufficed.
"Well," Jimmy said, as we walked, alone, up the sidewalk
past the record store and the shoe and the clothing stores and further
from the theater lights and further from town so the corner lights
were becoming dim behind us, as winter charms blew round us and
made us zip our jackets tighter, "what'd you think of the knobs?" And
I bent my shoulders down and I tried to get the etching out of my
mind and the way hormones play us like fools on unicycles, always
tumbling us, which makes us want it all the more, and how it was
good to get away from that penile carnival, to remember how it used
to be when things were sharp and bold and clear as frosty mornings
then had been and those that were to come. I didn't want to slip on
this ice. I was tired of it already before it had begun and Jimmy was
13 and I was 12 and I wanted to say, Jimmy, let's run away to where
they'll never find us. My secret solitary bed lying talks with him over
there across the street:
Let's run away and live off the land like Tarzan, or like the
boys in "Lord of the Flies," only we'll be kind and not form into wolf
packs like those boys did, and we can run on crystal beaches and
never think twice about taking our clothes off so we can dive in the
blue waters and we can catch fish in our hands and feel that slippery
wiggling of them before we set the fish free again. And the sun will
never forget us or wonder what happened to us when we grew old and
away because we would never grow old and away. And don't let us
off that island, ever. Let's just be kids like right now, you not afraid
of anything, me afraid of everything including, you got it right
Jimmy, my own shadow, that I have one and then that one day I won't
have one, and then what do I do? There was the old soul burning
bright leaves somewhere up ahead because the air smelled of autumn
fire and we know where it is Jimmy, if we just keep following the
thread of smoke no matter how invisible it might get to anybody else.
So, because all of this was just in my silent head, Jimmy
frogged me on my left shoulder, which hurt like hell, and asked again,
"What did you think of those knobs?" Bed knobs, door knobs, knobs
into inner sanctums of girls' restrooms and girls' locker rooms in the
back of PE class and the air heady with invisible knobs like you could
grab hold of over your head, if you could reach up so far, and open up
the sky and all the false faces would come falling rubbery and smelly
and ugly and old and witches' and scarecrow's and ghouls' faces all
round us, to fly to the ground under us, and we walking on the inside
of the masks which used to be our masks from our Halloweens
together. Don't let the ladder to the yellow cat eyes in the moon talk
about this stuff, Jimmy, don't go away from me. Don't degrade
yourself like this.
"Come on," he said, in a voice that was hollow and a little
harried as though a fork tine had been pulled along his spine and he
felt for some reason in a combative mode and I was the only person
around with whom to be combative--in other words, Jimmy did
something this time he had never done to me before--he was being
mean to me in a really hurtful way--scaring me--this was something
different--this was something that could kill a person. And even I was
a person. And even I could be killed.
"You saw 'em, didn't ya? In the mirror? She was with her
back to that g.d. camera when she let 'em fly, but there was in that
one scene, her in the mirror, and they were sticking out there and
huge like weather balloons. Man oh man." And then he repeated it
again, and something in me nodded, half heartedly, then a stronger
nod, the nod of a stranger I was already learning to play, as though I
was in on the joke. "And what about that tell tale heart? That
woman's own heart. Ripped out of her chest. Had to make a huge
door in that big booby to get that heart, didn't they? Gory as hell,
wasn't it? And then to have it still beating under that rum dum's bed.
God. Think about it. No Godzilla out your window in the dead of
night. No giant bat rat spiders from 'The Angry Red Planet' out your
window at three a.fuckin'm. knocking against your bedroom
windows."
This was always the thing with me and horror movies. They
stayed in my head, these things, these images like they were
impregnating my mind with little bugs of clouds I did not want. I
could never get rid of those graphic fears outside my house or the
Frankenstein monster breaking in the front door and heading right for
my bedroom or the wolfman breaking into my bedroom windows. But
this movie had no monsters. I felt at least a bit safe, free from
nightmares of this movie, at least I thought.
"Tonight, real late," Jimmy continued, his arm around my
shoulders, in a mock you are my pal gesture that meant something
else entirely, I had sadly recently begun to learn, "and you're safe
asleep and don't have to worry about the Amazing Colossal Man
beating your house to kindling and using your roof as a toothpick or
Godzilla frying you from the back yard with his heat ray, there is this
little sound instead--a shadow noise at first--and then a little louder,
like a drop of water dropping more and more insistently, and then a
bit louder and it starts to wave at you, hey wake up, you idiot, in your
dreams of bliss and big boobies, whether you want to admit it to me
or not, and it's this thump, then a little more, thump, then a little
more, and you wake up and its the--tell-tale-heart. What then, Barry?
What then, my frigid little friend?"
And my own heart sank and the world was suddenly too cold
and too glassy and too black and the air was too grim and too
grinning off in the distance like I could see it so very up close to my
eyes, and there it was again, another nightmare runnel to swim in
sleeplessness for a week or two or more until body weariness caved
me in and the seams of life became that much more difficult to pull
from reality and fantasy and keep it all somehow in some way
straight.
So Jimmy laughed, knowing he had gotten to me, planted
another crop of pain under my skin. As he looked at me, he slyly
grinning, and I looked at him and he was my worst enemy who I
wanted still to be my best friend and I shrugged my shoulder from
under his arm and I did something I had never done before with him
or with anyone really, save in my own head--I ran. I ran as far as fast
as I could. I tripped over breaks in the sidewalk. The cold air was
frosting on my arms and legs. My breath was short and gasping. And I
was running to the yellow moon somewhere up there at the edge of
the house where I had once lived and the house across the street
where he still did live. Where the night shadows came and collected.
Until the mailman brought the sun of mid morning lower and closer,
bright, inescapable day, to the earth and made sanity happen again
with the criss cross of communications of the living, making all well
again across the whole wide country.
And Jimmy was laughing behind me, laughing that Red
Curtain laugh he always gave me when we were at the theater before
the curtain of red thick wool or whatever it was, was raised above the
square torn screen--like one time, when we got there early, he said to
me, "It's gonna be real scary, this movie. Even the previews are going
to be scary and the movie--don't tell anybody, but Fred Harris's father
did not get a job in another town so they had to move--Fred saw this
movie in Memphis, and it killed him, scared him right to death, and
his family had to leave in embarrassment--too many questions about
stupid scaredy cat Fred--old man's loaded, so they kept it
quiet--anything not to embarrass them--hey" and my friend looked at
me, a hard and non-kidding look, as I slammed back more of my
large Coke and more M and M's.
"So," he continued, "don't embarrass me like that--when
Vincent Price has the dead woman's head in his hand, holding it by
her hair and he walks with it right up to the camera--well, just don't."
And I sweated at those past times and I died inside but I did
what he told me because James Van Sickle the 3rd knew best. I
always hoped he would see me, really see me and how I felt, and
maybe he did, so it was best not to be me and it was best just to run in
my dreams and there, the sweat of disloyalty and shame running
down the walls of the dream box, as I magicked cutting him to pieces
with an ax, or frying him alive and scattering the black carbon paper
confetti of him all over his grandmother's prize summer tomato patch
out behind their house, or of using Scott Forbes' Bowie knife on him
and cutting out his voice and cutting out his eyes so he would cut
out--hurting me.
Because that was all I knew then and all I know now love to
be. Being hurt. Being scared. Being angry at myself and he knew
because he knew everything and I ran this night because he knew
everything and because the moon up there in the sky cradle with the
starless climes was his home. Was where he was supposed to be. Not
down here, talking like the other boys did, of knobs and boobs and
curly patches. Not crap like that. Not pain like that that would leave
me farther and farther away until I was the only one on a cold fall
night like this one still stupidly looking up at the moon and knowing
whose face was, or should have been, in it. Once upon a time.
I was small and tinier than small, a red scarab beetle
diminishing in my returns as I ran scooted almost fell but caught
myself and flung myself onward through the night, my lungs flamed,
through the world that was like a mummy's bandaged rough harsh
endless desert finger that was flicking me off itself like a dog a flea
and Jimmy did not run after me for I was not worth being run after.
But he was running all the same. Running by standing still and
laughing at me and slapping his knees and thinking of all the things
he would say about me next day in school, and how he wasn't
championing the jerkiest kid on the planet anymore, not for laughs,
not for correction (mine of course, for my own good) or putting me
down with his words and looks and the other kids joining in (for my
own good of course) so he could sort of rescue me from the school
lunch plates of faces of fat greedy wormy smiles and eyes that had the
superiority of the third rank heavens that know they can never be
bettered in all the time there was; rescuing me, he did, by pulling at
my ear and saying, "come on Dumbo, let's leave the rank to their
trough." Which made him and them laugh all the more.
And it was the best. It was the very best time there was.
I got to the brick piles and I ducked, fell behind a large stack
of them and the ground was cold. The night was knives. The night
had no eyes for the eyes were all closed, regardless of what the
current hit teen song said, since there was no one to hide from. And in
the following order, Jimmy: Would not run after me. Would not walk
after me. Would not speak to me tomorrow or ever unless I spoke
first, and speaking first meant apologizing to him for being a sore
sorry little kid. Would not remember me if he never ever saw me
again. Or even if he did.
And I would apologize of course. As soon as I lay eyes on him
again. He would expect it, know it, as his due, would not wait me out,
had nothing to wait me out about, for the clock was on my head and
not his. He was a force, like autumn or winter snow, or like the moon.
Which I looked up at now. Craning till my neck hurt. It was an full
almost circular Harvest Moon and it looked so peaceful up there, like
you could grow winter wheat on it if you wanted and you could
harvest it and you could eat it like ambrosia it would taste. You could
stand up there in time and watch the graceful old Earth spin its
slightly deflated medicine ball self round and the sun from a long
distance and Mars further still, the angry red planet which had to be
really red, just had to be.
You could be yourself up there, with Jimmy's face in the
moon, and not a spaceship around to plop in his eye in that big moon
face, and love would happen there, where you wouldn't have to
pretend and fake it, where you and he could let the other see. And you
wouldn't have to lean to the side and cross your legs in
embarrassment because the afternoon spring sun shone so beautifully
on the gold hair of the boy in the desk in front of you, his face noble
and in profile, looking out the window, your heart crying look at me
please please. So I was a small boy. And small boys cry. We have the
right to do so. Small boys have friends any way they can find them.
Give up whatever of the soul or body was required as payment.
And it's not a bad thing really, just to do your best. That was
what Andy Taylor always told Opie, you do your best and I'm mighty
proud of you cause that's all anyone can expect, cause you're my
young'n and I love you.
And it breaks you sometimes, it just does is all. So you might
think even that little water dripping sound behind you as you hide in
the brick yard, that little Chinese water torture test right behind you,
that might be coming from a pipe in the brick yard that hadn't been
turned completely off yet, might be just that, or it could be a
thump-thump-thump. And if you're a little boy all alone in the cold
night air, trying to push the overloaded bags of thoughts and images
and feelings out of your suddenly headachy brain and trembling body
what with all that running you've been doing--you might think good,
it's the tell tale heart beating right behind me. That I can understand.
It feels like an old friend. A real one.
The movie explained the curse of the heart was that it drove
insane the man who lay in his bed over it. That part of the story at
least, even then, even to me at 12, when I believed anything a movie
or TV show said, sounded a bit lame. Just rip the flooring up, take
the heart and throw it out the window. It didn't have legs. It couldn't
keep coming back to your room. But the idea of it--a living thing
slimy and reddish and truly horribly shaped, this thing came in no
Russell Stover packaging for Valentines Day--the secret device that
was no longer keeping its host alive, but just itself, with no purpose,
dumbly ticking on for no reason other than it was there to scare
people witless. Scare them insane. Just by being what it was. It didn't
really have to do anything at all. It just--was.
The living disembodied heart. Because it didn't make sense. It
was not in its bed otherwise known as the chest. It was not embedded
there beneath the lungs like God intended. Out of place. Something
that meant nothing to anybody. That was not hooked up to anyone or
anything. You couldn't kill it because it had somehow become a
supernatural thing linked with an evil eye whatever that was, and it
was just this dumb thing--couldn't speak. Couldn't communicate. The
stupidity of it was the most terrifying thing about it.
Like the Jimmy in the moon which when you think about it is
pretty scary in its own right. A huge human face in the moon like
Ralph Kramden's friendly smile of a cartoon face in the opening
credits of "The Honeymooners," grinning, was funny and made me
smile and feel good. But Jimmy's face up there was like a dead man.
A death masque. The man with the scythe was the way Jimmy would
look up there in the moon in breathless space. Being smart and
knowing everything was kind of like being a smart ass and lording it
all over everybody else. And Jimmy all alone, needing no one but
himself up there in the moon, calling down uselessly "help me, come
get me please." Serves him right. Cut off. Not one thing or another.
Not able to communicate. Amputated from life on the Earth.
And maybe the booby jokes were masks too and the snatch
jokes and the grandma stuck her tongue in my mouth jokes at lunch.
Maybe that was Halloween all year round. And maybe a heart was the
only thing not fake. Not a Valentine heart which was just another
mask like in that episode of "Thriller" where Harry Townes looks at
his real reflection, what he truly is inside, not the respectable exterior,
and finds the most grotesque of monsters in there, in him, that he
can't run away from, and even Jimmy sitting beside me put his own
couch pillow to his face, as I put the other pillow to mine, when that
crawling nightmare came on the TV screen.
You can live without masks. It's difficult. Though it can be
done.
But you can't live without a heart. Even when it's something
you try to ignore because you're ashamed it's there beating in your
chest in the first place cause it's embarrassing that you have to
depend on those squishy squashy slimy smelly guts and stuff to
survive. These things that are in you and work interlocked, like the
grass and coral and the swimming things at the bottom of the ocean
that is you, for we learned two days ago in school we are mostly
water and worth less than two dollars. Even soaking wet. But there is
no choice. A man in the moon is for tomorrow. A man in the moon is
for the hearts pumping to get him there. But a heart. First of all,
you've got to have a heart. Regardless. Like all the songs say.
So I stayed there for a while longer. Knowing I was going to
get the whipping of my life when I got home because it had to be far
later than the allotted 10:20 or so, the amount of time it would take to
walk home from the theater. I was thinking about hearts and what I
could leave under Jimmy's bed and that of course would have to be
myself, for it seemed I had not anything in my head or heart but
emotion, that I was the pump in its entirety, because I would cry at
the stupidest silliest things. Though I tried so hard not to, at least
when anyone else was around.
Helplessly, I would cry when I was happy and would cry when
I was the opposite and many times sadness made me happy in a
melancholy sort of feeling and the other way round too. I could not
cut out my heart and give to him because, then, who would take it and
put it under the flooring beneath his bed? I couldn't put me under
there either. The vacuum cleaner would surely nudge me and find me
eventually.
But there was Rita--yes, always, Rita. She hung on Jimmy's
every word, his every movement, his every wish, his every moment of
breath as long as she could, and she and Jimmy were dependent on
each other though he made a big show of pretending no, and I made a
bigger show of pretending not to see, so I thought it would work best
that way. I could slice the heart out of him and put the evil sickly
small undernourished thing under where she slept. She was his go fer,
accepted most dutifully, most placidly, and of course I had applied
for that position years ago, full time.
Thinking these things now made shadows seem calmer now,
this dark cold unrepentant night that it seemed oddly enough I was
now part of.
The edges of things seemed sharper and they cut into me, but
it was like riding up a steep hill on my bicycle against a strong wind,
and I thought I couldn't make it, that I would come to a complete
stand still and then start rolling backwards, but I learned gradually,
after all those times of coming to a complete stand still and then
rolling backwards, that if I pushed my chest, my stomach, all of me
into the handlebars and the front steering column of the bike, that I
could somehow become one with it. I could use it like it was my own
body and the pedals my feet, with the framework my own torso's, and
it worked. It gave me power for the climb.
It lengthened me. It re-shaped me. I became one with metal
and rubber and will and spirit. As the concrete I rode up and the air
around me and the sky looking down at me, became a part of me too.
It almost burst my heart sack to do it, but I was revolutionized. I did
it! And got better and better at it as I tried more and more. Hard
breath at the top gradually became less so. I wasn't a little kid on a
bike. The bike wasn't a device. We both lived into each other.
So if any kind of blood in movies or on TV, even in black and
white, made me sick, if cutting up dead frogs in science class made
me want to barf, well, wasn't that like riding a bike up a steep hill on
a windy day, with the crest of the hill not an impossible challenge that
I could never reach, never penetrate, but a huge friendly hand coming
half way to meet me and pulling me in to the top, the rest of the way?
So. If I could get a knife. Easy. Butcher's knife from our kitchen. And
I could prove to Rita, at least, if not to myself or anyone else for
whom he was also a star, and he was a star to many girls, as well as
the boys, that Jimmy wasn't what she thought. And then Rita would
like me while Jimmy's heart would be beating beneath her--though of
course I knew, not really beating after all--then she who Jimmy loved
of anyone on the planet, would be my friend, would be my
companion. She would forget all about him. And would forget all
about him for me too. And someday when I thought she could take it,
would be ready for the truth for a change, I would tell her and we
would be closer and closer friends.
My own tell tale heart had been beating so fast during all of
this I hadn't noticed it, but now that it was slowing down, I did, the
aftermath of it. I decided Jimmy would be already home by now,
drinking the cocoa his Gran had waiting for him as they would sit in
the living room and talk before he went to bed and Gran watched
some of Jack Parr's show before she went to her own bedroom. I
stood up and dusted myself off. I wanted to give my heart to him to
tell him I loved him. But if I could have somehow entered
supernatural territory and done that, I would just see him unaffected
by it, so I would have to give him my liver, and kidneys and spleen
and my eyes and nose and tonsils and vocal cords, etc, my blood and
bone and true to you, and he wouldn't have given a damn about that
either.
There was so much to plan. How to do it. When and where.
What to do with the body. Leave it in the nearby woods. But being
sure someone found it and alerted others. How to carry the heart to
Rita and put it under her while she slept. How to wrap it.
Butcher paper. Valentine candy box. So much planning.
Would it really thump thump in my hands as I carried it along? I
knew it would not. But, what if it did? Well, I thought, that would be
kind of cool too. I would have to think a long time to get it worked
out. But that didn't matter. It would be fun to think about. To dream
about. It would be more fun probably thinking it through a million
different ways than actually accomplishing my mission.
It was the same thing as seeing Lon Chaney Jr. become the
full blown wolfman, which was never as scary as guessing at how he
will look, from shadows and silhouettes and descriptions. So this
would be like an exciting, long delicious drink of a horror movie that
I would create and direct and star in, so it would not be scary to me,
because I would be in control of it. I would not have to deny what I
see. Or try to look off to the side when something frightening
happened. I could look at the screen dead center. With a certain
coldness. A certain calculatedness like Jimmy had so much of. A
totally different perspective for me.
So I walked on home in a most patient comfort, and the night
did not yawn with horror visited on me, like a nightmare from the
moon unfolding so far above me that I could do nothing about it. But
instead it was a nightmare inside me, in the movie theater of my
imagination that made it not a nightmare at all. For there was a vision
to it. A rightness to it.
And I discovered with a certain lightness in my step that it
was a creature of a totally different color, size and shape. I didn't
know how to whistle except by sucking the air in, which was what I
did on my way home tonight. Jimmy had tried to get me to whistle
correctly, and I had tried so very hard but never could get the hang of
it, so my way would have to do. The cold air hurt my teeth, struck one
in particular that had a cavity, but the cold air felt good too.
It would be sad without Jimmy. But it would be my decision
from here on out. Not his. And that counted for a lot. Maybe he
would find the boobs he wanted on the other side. And if he did, I'm
sure it would me a most fair trade as far as he was concerned. A gift
of the big beyond beyond boob from the little boob back on planet
Earth such as it was. Good night and good news, my true blue.
I turned the corner on my block, and coming to third house on
the right, I heard the dog barking from the dog house in the yard. In
the humans' house, behind the chained mutt, the lights in the living
room glowing warmly through the windows. A warmth that it would
not experience these cold days and colder nights. They made that
mutt stay out in all kinds of weather. Cold and snow and sleet. And
also in hottest most humid summer. And that dog loved its human
family nevertheless. It made me mad. If I had a dog, I would never
treat it like that. The barking was of a most mournful quest. Long and
slow and heart deep. I stood at the lip of my sidewalk, watching and
listening and sad at the weeping cry of it.
I said in a whisper that would soon be a whisper louder and
louder like the tell tale heart eventually clanging fear up and down
the whole county or maybe farther, the tale of a heart of little and
mean sort (ripped from a dead hard cold corpse with a gaping
bloodless hole in his chest) buried under the bed of someone who
deserved far better and who would be rescued from horror by a dark
prince, "don't give up, Rita. Help is on the way. You'll be warm
soon."
And Rita suddenly barked differently, as though she
immediately knew what I was thinking and saying. She barked with
more strength, more purpose, not as melancholy, that contained
maybe for the first time ever, happiness.
A sound sort of like--hope.
"I'll be the shadow of your dog,
just please don't go away."
Rod McKuen
THE END